I am actually not excited about the movement to streaming only content. The DRM rules limit your fair use rights to the product and then whatever other restriction the content owner wants to slap in...

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Which is why I've only purchased electronic media when I've known, going in, I could remove the DRM.

I am actually not excited about the movement to streaming only content. The DRM rules limit your fair use rights to the product and then whatever other restriction the content owner wants to slap in...

As we have seen in the book industry - purchase a physical book and you can do with it what you want, get an ecopy and you can only use it in the specific way the DRM owner has granted. All for the same price!

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But DVDs aren't books. I've got Blurays and DVDs that force me to watch commercials when they load (and disable FF) and others that insist I manually bypass their ads and INTERPOL warnings and so forth. And I'm dependent on other technology to use them. 8-track, Beta, S-VHS, laserdisc...having the physical medium doesn't do much good if the players go south, or worse, get engineered to do similar things to what some streaming solutions do now.

On the other hand, I see streaming as a solution, not a medium. The nice thing about having the media is that I can do what I want with it, like you say. I've ripped more than a few movies so I could put them on a portable device or other unit for more convenient viewing/listening. I don't want to see that go away.

But DVDs aren't books. I've got Blurays and DVDs that force me to watch commercials when they load (and disable FF) and others that insist I manually bypass their ads and INTERPOL warnings and so forth. And I'm dependent on other technology to use them. 8-track, Beta, S-VHS, laserdisc...having the physical medium doesn't do much good if the players go south, or worse, get engineered to do similar things to what some streaming solutions do now.

On the other hand, I see streaming as a solution, not a medium. The nice thing about having the media is that I can do what I want with it, like you say. I've ripped more than a few movies so I could put them on a portable device or other unit for more convenient viewing/listening. I don't want to see that go away.

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eBooks, and streaming services like Hulu+ and Xfinity are good representations of the future DRM controlled environment we are moving into.

Once the product is all 0's and 1's the concept of ownership that you get with a physical product dies. You have simply licensed the right to use the product based on an arbitrary set of rules that may or may not have been defined as of yet.

And the content owners / content delivery services get to set those rules.

I stopped buying movies years ago. The small collection of DVDs and Blu-Rays I have mostly still have the shrink wrap on the cases. I get Blu-Rays and a few DVDs from NetFlix with the 2-at-a-time plan and I have amassed more movies than I will ever have time to watch. I rip them all to a 21TB server in mkv format and watch them when my TV viewing slacks off in the summer. Having something to watch has never been an issue for me. I've got movies going back 5 or 6 years that I've never watched.

eBooks, and streaming services like Hulu+ and Xfinity are good representations of the future DRM controlled environment we are moving into.

Once the product is all 0's and 1's the concept of ownership that you get with a physical product dies. You have simply licensed the right to use the product based on an arbitrary set of rules that may or may not have been defined as of yet.

And the content owners / content delivery services get to set those rules.

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I agree and if the consumer wants any say in what the rules are they are going to have to use Government to create some rules favorable to consumers.

I stopped buying movies years ago. The small collection of DVDs and Blu-Rays I have mostly still have the shrink wrap on the cases. I get Blu-Rays and a few DVDs from NetFlix with the 2-at-a-time plan and I have amassed more movies than I will ever have time to watch. I rip them all to a 21TB server in mkv format and watch them when my TV viewing slacks off in the summer. Having something to watch has never been an issue for me. I've got movies going back 5 or 6 years that I've never watched.

On the topic of this thread, I have never purchase much media (VHS, DVD, or blu-ray) as I tend to only watch stuff once (no kids). I am also not that picky when it comes to what content I watch so given all the ways to access stuff now and the limited amount of time I have to actually watch anything I certainly am not planning on purchasing any media.

604 movies (actually 609, but I haven't added the 4 I got yesterday or the 1 that'll arrive today to it yet)

1,710 books.

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Pretty impressive!

My collecting as of late has slowed dramatically, but I am recording a lot of stuff we almost forgot over the years lately from TV and I am archiving it in HD on my server, so technically I am "collecting" that too, I guess.

While I agree that the direction of streaming seems to be the way of the future, keep one thing in mind when collecting and archiving your own material. Back it up.

Unless you have EVERYTHING on actual discs, having 10TB of hard drive space on a home media server of some kind with thousands of movies and/or TV shows is great, but if that drive fails, you will lose IT ALL. I say this cause I speak from experience.

A long time ago, I had a simple 250GB hard drive fail on me. It had just movie and TV shows on it. I didn't really mind too much on what was lost as I was pretty much able to obtain the important stuff, but it made me rethink how I store important material.

Now, I have a hard drive with photos and my music that is backed up to other locations (online and/or additional hard drives). Using some sort of RAID setup is probably another good way to go as well when it comes to backing up all those movies and TV shows.

While I agree that the direction of streaming seems to be the way of the future, keep one thing in mind when collecting and archiving your own material. Back it up.

Unless you have EVERYTHING on actual discs, having 10TB of hard drive space on a home media server of some kind with thousands of movies and/or TV shows is great, but if that drive fails, you will lose IT ALL. I say this cause I speak from experience.

A long time ago, I had a simple 250GB hard drive fail on me. It had just movie and TV shows on it. I didn't really mind too much on what was lost as I was pretty much able to obtain the important stuff, but it made me rethink how I store important material.

Now, I have a hard drive with photos and my music that is backed up to other locations (online and/or additional hard drives). Using some sort of RAID setup is probably another good way to go as well when it comes to backing up all those movies and TV shows.

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I have a 4 drive (1.5 TB each) NAS and one drive died on my a month or so ago. Have had it for about 4 years, so a bit early for a drive to go.

But yeah, drives fail

Photos (i.e. important stuff) is backed up in like 10 places (multi in home, online, parents house)

Using some sort of RAID setup is probably another good way to go as well when it comes to backing up all those movies and TV shows.

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Be careful, there. Using a RAID array as a backup medium is perfectly fine. Indeed, I have a backup server that does just that. Storing material on a RAID array, as opposed to a simple drive, is NOT a substitue for a backup solution, however.

The sizes involved with the movies and videos and music are too large to back up. Using a RAID or duplication like with a WHS is the best way. I have dozens of Terabytes of content. There is no way I could back it all up. Worst case, I would have to pull the discs out of storage if my WHS or unRAIDs went belly up.

The sizes involved with the movies and videos and music are too large to back up. Using a RAID or duplication like with a WHS is the best way. I have dozens of Terabytes of content. There is no way I could back it all up. Worst case, I would have to pull the discs out of storage if my WHS or unRAIDs went belly up.

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I agree, but I have a LOT less than you. My Total space is 12TB right now with 8 useable (8 TB RAID plus an additional set of 2 2TB discs mirroring each other). Still, I only have about 3TB free- and I haven't archived even half of my discs.

Hopefully, I will get by until 3TB discs become the norm, or I end up with a totally new solution.

On another note, everyone in my house has enjoyed the elimination of discs as much as I have been able to. No one wants to trek down to the media closet to choose a movie any more. With pyTivo and Vidmgr, searching from the Tivo is so cool they love to show their friends.

The sizes involved with the movies and videos and music are too large to back up.

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There is no such thing as "too large to back up". Multi-terrabyte tape backup media are available. Solutions like dar can break up the backup into chunks that can fit on individual hard drives. A backup array will no more than double the cost of storage, while securing the data and having it available on line.

RAID is not a backup solution, period. A RAID N array for N > 0 is less frail than a single hard drive, but it is not fault proof. I can tell you from personal experience RAID arrays can and do fail on a regular basis. If a backup does not exist then POOF! - the data is gone.

Even more to the point, users are even less reliable than hard drives. Even the most competent user will occasionally accidentally delete or overwrite important data. A proper backup strategy stands as decent insurance against data loss in both scenarios.

I agree, but I have a LOT less than you. My Total space is 12TB right now with 8 useable (8 TB RAID plus an additional set of 2 2TB discs mirroring each other). Still, I only have about 3TB free- and I haven't archived even half of my discs.

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My main storage systrem is a RAID6 array built from eight 3T spindles, giving a total storage of 18T. This system has 5T free at the moment.

My backup server hosts a RAID6 array built from twelve 1.5T spindles, with 2.3T free at the moment. Every morning at 04:00, rsync copies over any new or updated friles from the main array to the backup.

Every couple of months, I run dar against the backup system and incrementally archive any updates to 1T and 1.5T hard drives stored off premises.

Hopefully, I will get by until 3TB discs become the norm, or I end up with a totally new solution.

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Actually, right now 2T and 3T discs tie for lowest cost per byte if one does not consider the cost of power and drive slots. After considering the cost of a drive slot, 3T drives win at about $80 per T, but 4T drives arent too far behind at about $90 per T, especially after considering the energy cost of 3T drives.

On another note, everyone in my house has enjoyed the elimination of discs as much as I have been able to. No one wants to trek down to the media closet to choose a movie any more. With pyTivo and Vidmgr, searching from the Tivo is so cool they love to show their friends.

There is no such thing as "too large to back up". Multi-terrabyte tape backup media are available. Solutions like dar can break up the backup into chunks that can fit on individual hard drives. A backup array will no more than double the cost of storage, while securing the data and having it available on line.

RAID is not a backup solution, period. A RAID N array for N > 0 is less frail than a single hard drive, but it is not fault proof. I can tell you from personal experience RAID arrays can and do fail on a regular basis. If a backup does not exist then POOF! - the data is gone.

Even more to the point, users are even less reliable than hard drives. Even the most competent user will occasionally accidentally delete or overwrite important data. A proper backup strategy stands as decent insurance against data loss in both scenarios.

WHS? Windows Home Server? You lost me, there. What do you mean by "duplication"?

Every last byte, or some large fraction of which could be lost in the event of an array failure. Even a loss of a small fraction may be serious if the data is critical.

Then sooner or later, you will lose it. It is better to cut your storage in half, using the other half as backup media, and preferentially choose which data to discard than to risk losing all of it.

Pull what discs out of storage? If you are storing a copy of your data in off-line hard discs, then you have a backup solution.

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The original BD and HD DVD discs.

And I guess I should have said too large to make a backup practical.

I never said RAID was a backup solution. Just that that is the best thing to use to help avoid data loss. In my unRAID I would have to lose the parity drive and one of the array drives to lose any data. And then it would only be the data on the one array drive that would be lost.

With the WHS it uses duplication(if you enable it). So all the data in the drive pool is located on two hard drives in the drive pool. I currently have thirty one drives in my drive pool. Both the drives with the specific data would need to go belly up to lose that specific data.

But so far over the last twenty years of using hard drives. Close to two hundred, I've yet to have a hard drive fail once put into service. I know it can happen, but so far it hasn't. Even my old 20MB(yes MB) drive from the early 90's still works.

Is your ripped Blu-ray content playing back at the same quality as if you were playing the disk itself? I've thought about putting all of my movies to disk in order to have the collection available through TiVo - but I really enjoy how incredible some of the Blu-rays look and sound. I don't think I'd want to lose that in favor of convenience.